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New York City Street Lights To Go LED
eldavojohn writes "Wired has a short piece on NYC's new street light project. I don't think we need to belabor the many benefits that LEDs hold over traditional light bulbs, but the finishing touches are being addressed, and they will hopefully be put into place sometime next year. This design won a competition back in 2004, and OVI has been whittling down the prototypes. At $1.175 million, this sounds like a pretty cheap deal considering the DOE forked over $21 million to 13 R&D projects along the same lines."
They can choose any frequency they want for the tail lights, so for the parking lights, which are normally used at night, they choose something around 60-70Hz. It is like they are trying to be annoying.
I dunno. Lots of people claim they can see the 'flicker' on a CRT with a 70 hz vertical refresh rate. If I turn my head wayyyyyy to the left or right, putting the monitor in my peripheral vision, I might be able to see the flicker on a 60 hz, but never at 70 hz or higher.
Then again, there's also a bunch of crazy people that say they can hear LCD flat panel displays making a buzzing noise. I can't hear that either.
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That'll just slow down the warm-up by delaying the current draw. By itself, an inductor simply turns the current 90 degrees from the voltage, which is generally a bad thing for efficiency. Combine it with a capacitor (which turns the current 90 degrees the other way), and you might be getting somewhere. Combine it with a bunch of other logic (parallel/series components), and you end up with ... basically complexity.
Seriously, if you start your thought process with "I only pulled a B in something, but couldn't you fix ..." when the people working on it have bachelor's degrees (or master's or PhD's) in the subject area, it probably would not solve the problem
-- got an EE degree over 11 years ago, and never used it in the field, so details are hazy.